The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Fortune Cookies

Once Maomao got back to the dormitory, she pulled out the treats, opening the cloth and laying the cookies on top of it. There were seven in total, all with papers of about the same size inside them.

The heck is this?

The characters looked like a cross between snakes and earthworms. They were western characters, just like her father had been using; she thought she recalled that this was called cursive, a form of the letters adapted for writing quickly. The papers were covered with little clumps of two or three letters, but they weren’t words; unlike the language of Li, in the west you had to put several characters together or they wouldn’t mean anything. So she couldn’t “read” the isolated, individual letters. Were they supposed to mean something?

She’s testing us, Maomao thought. This consort certainly had her quirks. She was, after all, gutsy enough to enter the rear palace almost completely alone.

Realizing that she was being put to the test angered Maomao. But even more, it made her want to solve the riddle.

She looked from the cookies to the papers and back. Each of the papers had either two or three letters on it, and the papers themselves didn’t have neat corners, but rather ragged edges, some of them on a bit of an angle. Maybe they’d been torn. The paper was stained with grease from the cookies, but thanks to the high quality of the material, it hadn’t come apart.

This is awfully involved for a practical joke. What was the woman after? Maomao looked through the paper, but she didn’t see anything.

She was still puzzling over it when there was a knock at the door. She answered it, a piece of paper still in her hand, to discover Yao and En’en standing there. They lived in the same dormitory—not that it mattered much to Maomao, seeing as they never spoke to her.

“Can I help you?” Maomao asked politely.

Yao, however, looked incensed. “I know you got some treats from the consort this afternoon. Give them to me.”

Funny thing—Maomao didn’t even have a special attachment to sweets, yet the moment she heard the demanding tone in Yao’s voice, she decided she wasn’t about to hand the cookies over. To be fair, she could tell that Yao wasn’t asking for them as a snack. So she decided to tweak her a bit.

“I’m very sorry, but I ate them for my dinner. Western cookies are rather papery, aren’t they? Do you suppose they have germ in them?” She tried to make it sound like she could still feel the funny texture in her mouth.

The blood drained from Yao’s face and she virtually pounced on Maomao. “Spit them out! Spit them out right now!” She was shaking her. Ah. Her cookies must have had paper in them too. “Where are the rest?! You couldn’t have eaten all of them without noticing!”

“Lady Yao,” En’en said, finally stopping her from the violent shaking she was giving Maomao. She looked as dispassionate as ever. “I think I detect a slight smile on Maomao’s face, as if she thinks she’s made a fool of you. I believe you’re being teased.”

So En’en remembered Maomao’s name! And could read her expressions, no less.

“You’re teasing me?! Is that true?!”

Jig’s up, Maomao thought, straightening her collar and meeting Yao’s eyes. “I admit I was having a bit of fun with you, but I might suggest you were uncivil to me first. I don’t know what you have against me, but bursting into a person’s room and trying to take their things is theft and nothing but.”

What Maomao was saying was perfectly right and true; no one could have objected. The blood rushed back to Yao’s face, until she was so red she looked like steam should be coming out of her like a teapot. She took a deep breath, then let it out again and looked straight at Maomao. “Was there anything unusual about the cookies you were given? If there was, I want you to give them to me. I’ll pay you enough to get another snack.”

“What do you mean by ‘anything unusual’?”

“Anything, you know, unusual! Like, was there something weird inside them?”

The idea of getting some pocket change appealed to Maomao, but she couldn’t let go of the riddle of the mysterious paper. She didn’t want to just fork over the cookies. It sounded like Yao and En’en had found something similar in their snacks, but Maomao doubted they would be too eager to tell her what it was.

She glanced at En’en. The young woman played the part of Yao’s attendant to perfection, but when she looked back at Maomao, she seemed far more coolheaded than her mistress. Maybe I should try talking to her, Maomao thought, trying to figure out how to move the conversation along.

“If you’re asking whether there was anything inside the treats I received, it implies there was something in yours, yes? If you tell me about it, I’ll share what I know too.”

Yao didn’t say anything, but she looked awfully put out. En’en was watching her mistress’s reactions closely. Maomao held out the piece of paper in her hand. “Show me what you found, and you can see the rest of these.”

Each piece of paper had different letters written on it. If they were ever going to decipher the meaning, they would need all of them, which meant Maomao had no qualms about revealing just one.

“Where are they?” Yao said.

“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Maomao replied.

Ultimately, she and Yao were equals. They’d both taken the same test and they’d both passed, so now differences in social status weren’t supposed to matter. Many people might feel they still did, but here, at this moment, they were on even terms.

“Lady Yao,” En’en said.

“Fine,” Yao said at length. All she could do was nod her agreement. “But I won’t have this conversation standing out in the hall.”

“Certainly. In my room, then,” Maomao said.

“No, in my room!” Yao responded. Maomao couldn’t have cared less which room they talked in, but to simply roll over and let her have her way would have handed her the initiative.

It was En’en who saved the situation from becoming a stalemate. “How about we use one of the meeting rooms, then? I can go reserve one for us.” She was referring to the dormitory’s meeting rooms, which could be used for business—and locked for more private conversations.

“Very well. I’ll get ready,” Maomao said. She scooped the rest of the cookies into a carrying cloth and they left the room.

En’en succeeded in reserving one of the meeting rooms immediately. The place was big enough for at least ten people, which made it feel pretty massive with just the three of them in there.

“We each show what we have at the same time,” Yao said.

“I know, I know,” said Maomao. They were on either side of a long table, with En’en sitting at the head.

They each opened their carrying cloths simultaneously, revealing piles of cookies numbering seven, seven, and six. One person had fewer cookies than the others—and that person was Yao, who looked bashfully away from Maomao. “I... I might have tasted one.”

“Ah,” Maomao said, seeing that one of the pieces of paper was partially torn, the characters damp. At least Yao had a full complement of seven pieces of paper. Like Maomao’s, each one had some letters on it.

Then there was En’en, who had cookies but no paper.

“You haven’t taken yours out yet?” Maomao asked, but En’en shook her head.

“None of mine had so much as a scrap in them,” she said, showing them the holes in the mysterious cylindrical cookies. It was clear there was nothing inside. If she was telling the truth, then they had seven and seven pieces of paper, fourteen in all. Could they make some kind of sense out of the letters written on them?

Maybe if we line them up the right way, we’ll see something? Maomao thought. Yao appeared to have had the same idea, because she was setting the pieces next to each other, trying them in different arrangements. She’d put slight folds in Maomao’s pieces so they would remember whose were whose. No matter how they swapped the pieces around, though, all any of them could do—including Maomao and En’en, let alone Yao—was stare at the letters, perplexed.

“Can you tell what it says, En’en?” Yao asked.

“I’m very sorry. I’ve only dabbled in Shaohnese. I can carry on a bit of a conversation, but this...”

So Maomao had been right—En’en had been watching her father write during the exam because she could read a bit of the language herself.

Yao turned to Maomao, though she wasn’t very happy about it. “What about you?”

“I’m not much better, I’m afraid. If I had actual words front of me I might be able to understand them, but putting them together from pieces?” She was probably about as likely as En’en to figure it out. As they arranged and rearranged the pieces of paper, she kept thinking it was about to come to her, only for it to not quite click. If they just kept trying combinations, she felt like they would hit on something eventually, but it would take a tremendous amount of time. Not to mention that, unfortunately, the letters on one of the paper pieces had been obscured by teeth marks and spit and weren’t legible anymore. Perhaps remorseful for what she’d done, Yao was a little less imperious now.

“I wonder if there’s anything else that might serve as a clue here,” Maomao said, looking at the cookies. All of the treats were the same shape. Well, not identical, of course, but you couldn’t have told them apart with the naked eye.

“How do they taste?” Maomao wondered next, giving the cookies an experimental sniff. All of them smelled the same, and when she tried a few pieces, they tasted the same too: they made her tongue tingle slightly. There must have been ginger in the recipe, for flavor.

At this point, there was no way of knowing which piece of paper had come from which cookie anyway.

“Do you think it’s possible there just isn’t any meaning?” En’en asked.

“You know, I remember hearing about some temple where they baked fortunes into their treats,” Yao said.

Fortunes. Might the letters on the paper strips refer to good or bad fortune? It didn’t look like it to Maomao. “But if these are supposed to be fortunes, why did one of us get cookies with nothing in them?” Maomao said.

The other two nodded. The consort hadn’t looked like she was making a deliberate decision about whom to give which cookies when she passed them out. But if they weren’t just snacks, then what—

“Could it be?” Maomao said. She looked at the cloth the cookies had been wrapped in. Hers and Yao’s were solid colors, but En’en’s had a pattern on it. She studied the pattern: there were angles everywhere; the cloth appeared to have been dyed only after the pattern had been applied. She could see something, ever so faint—were those brushstrokes?

“Look at this,” she said, spreading the cloth open on the table. She looked from the pieces of paper to the pattern and back again, then began to line up the papers with the angles in the pattern. Before long, she found that she had neatly filled all the gaps. “I knew it.”

The letters formed two rows composed of several words each. A message.

“Um... What’s it say?” Yao asked, squinting at it. It clearly bugged her to be the only one who couldn’t read the words.

“I see ‘pale’ and a question mark,” Maomao said.

“And this one means ‘to know,’ right? And this one...‘the truth’?” En’en added.

Between them they tried to work out what they could. Even with the faded and unreadable paper, by piecing together the rest of the context, they thought they could make sense of it.

“Does this say...‘woman’?”

“Looks like it.”

They put their heads together, and bit by bit they decoded the message, until they read: Do you want to know the true identity of the pale woman?

Maomao broke out in gooseflesh. Give me a break! She’d been so sure that was all over. Why was it coming back to haunt her now?

The pale woman: she had to be the one they called the White Lady. But she was supposed to be imprisoned, unable to do anything more. Did Aylin know something about her that she hadn’t told Jinshi or Basen? And why would she choose to reveal it to some court ladies working as medical assistants?

“Who or what is the pale woman?” Yao asked, cocking her head. Apparently she didn’t know of the White Lady or all the talk she’d stirred up among the populace.

En’en only studied the row of letters quietly. For her part, Maomao thought this was something they should report to Jinshi immediately, but when she stood up, someone grabbed her wrist. It was En’en. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

“Where? To report this, that’s where. We have to, don’t we?” Maomao was a careful person; she didn’t like having to keep dangerous secrets all to herself. What she was doing was perfectly rational.

“I think it’s the right thing to tell someone about this,” Yao said, for once taking Maomao’s side.

Maomao assumed that En’en would give in and follow Yao’s decision, but instead she said, “Just what kind of person would give a riddle like this to some medical apprentices she just met?” She looked at Maomao; the way she asked the question, it almost sounded like she thought Maomao knew Aylin.

I really don’t, Maomao objected privately. She did know one thing, though: Aylin was a skilled operator. Even if they went to someone with this story, she’d probably already prepared some way of getting out of it. Or could it be...

“Do you think this is some sort of test as well?” En’en said.

“A test?” Maomao asked.

When she thought about it, it seemed plausible. Candidates for the medical assistantship had been screened more aggressively than the other court ladies, and even those who passed the test could be cut loose without a moment’s notice if they were deemed unsuitable. Yes, the possibility was certainly there.

But then again...

If this was a test, it seemed to go well beyond what could ordinarily be expected of helpers in the medical office. For one thing, solving it required some knowledge of the language of the west—and of course, it had never been a given that the three young women would share the information from their snacks with each other. Someone was searching for people with the ability to consider multiple sides of a situation and adapt.

Almost like...

Almost like a spy.

If Jinshi had some part in this, then it was possible. What connection could there be, though? But go far enough, and—

Nope. I don’t understand.

If that was the case, then they didn’t have to report things willy-nilly. They could try to talk to Aylin, play it by ear. Yes, they could, but...

“I’m reporting it,” Maomao said.

“You think I can’t hear you two talking? What if it’s a test?!” Yao demanded.

If it was a test, then she would fail; that was all. Maomao had already qualified as a medical assistant. She didn’t expect they would take work away from her because of this. Frankly, she was already on more than her maximum tolerable dose of work.

“Please, don’t worry. You’re both welcome to talk to the consort.”

And I’ll be mixing up medicines in the medical office.

The two other young women could pass the test; they would be more than enough. There was no telling what they might be called on to do when and if they passed this additional test.

I’m not interested, Maomao thought. She was perfectly content to hang around the medical office, doing laundry or making tea or whatever other little chores were needed, having her old man and the other medical officers teach her new formulae. Maybe occasionally trying them out on some sturdy-looking soldier who came by. That was all she really wanted. A modest happiness, but enough for her.

The other two ladies, however, wore scary looks. They had a firm grip on Maomao and were glaring at her. Particularly Yao.

“We couldn’t have solved this without the three of us together. If you go telling, she’ll assume we agreed.”

So what was she trying to say?

“You’re in this with us!” Yao and En’en chorused.

All Maomao could do was hold up her hands a little and smile wryly.